Rogue Science and Biased Media

This has not been a good week for the climate alarmists. Nor has it been a good week for the mainstream media. The MSM has proven once again that much of the media is no longer interested in objectivity, fact, and even-handedness, but is instead into advocacy journalism, censorship, and agenda-pushing.

This becomes crystal clear when we consider the startling revelations coming from the leaked climate change emails. This scandal – now dubbed Climategate – is getting bigger by the day, but you would not even know it was happening if you relied only on the MSM.

Once again it is the alternative media, especially the blogosphere, that is breaking these sorts of stories, and giving them the proper coverage they deserve. Indeed, not only is the MSM deliberately censoring this story about the leaked emails, but it continues to jump on any bit of climate alarmism it can find.

Thus while it has basically ignored Climategate, it is all agog over another story claiming that climate change is even worse than we thought. All the usual suspects ranging from the Age to the ABC to SBS have been flogging this story, while steadfastly ignoring the much more important story of scientific fraud and deception.

The Melbourne Age for example is running with banner headlines in its coverage of more gloom and doom: “Warming diagnosis: beyond worst case”. Wow, it really is the end of the world. And yet the real story, of bogus science and falsified data is being completely bypassed by these media outlets.

Just imagine a similar story of corruption, cover-up, and deception involving some conservative or religious group. The MSM would be beating such a story to death. But our politically correct MSM is only interested in pushing its own leftist agendas, not in proper news coverage.

Meanwhile, back at the alternative media, each new day brings out even more sordid details about Climategate. Andrew Bolt has conveniently offered us some of these leaked emails, and boy are they explosive. Let me here just reprint the list as presented by Bolt in today’s Herald Sun:

FIDDLING DATA: “Hide the decline”
Phil Jones tells Mike Mann and others how he made his data show warming:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Mick Kelly, Professor of Climate Change at Jones’ university, on hiding recent cooling:
“Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the filtered curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent cold-ish years.”
A CRU programming code for dealing with tree-ring data:
“Uses corrected MXD but shouldn’t usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”
From green entrepreneur Adam Markham to the CRU, asking for better propaganda:
“(WWW Australia) are worried that this may present a slightly more conservative approach to the risks than they are hearing from CSIRO. In particular, they would like to see the section on variability and extreme events beefed up if possible.”

FAITH, NOT SCIENCE: “This is all gut feeling”
Phil Jones shows his faith:
“I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.”
Phil Jones to his CRU staff:
“I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020. I’d rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office press release with Doug’s paper that said something like – half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998!”
From Phil Jones to Adelaide-born Tom Wigley, now of the US University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, saying he cannot believe the Medieval Warm Period really was warmer:
“Bottom line – there is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years … this is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and variability.”
From Phil Jones to Mike Mann, on the death of Australian sceptic John Daly:
“In an odd way this is cheering news!”

COVERING UP: “Destroy the emails”
Phil Jones warns Mike Mann that Steve McIntyre and Prof Ross McKittrick, two sceptics who first debunked Mann’s “hockey stick”, are now wanting to check CRU data:
“If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone … We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”
From Phil Jones to Mike Mann and others:
“PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!”
Phil Jones to American climatologist and IPCC lead author Benjamin Santer:
“I did get an email from the FoI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting emails – unless this was normal deleting to keep emails manageable!”
Phil Jones to Mike Mann, just three weeks after an FOI request from sceptic David Holland:
“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise … Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?”

SILENCING SCEPTICS: “Beat the crap out of him”
Ben Santer on a sceptic :
“Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him.”
Phil Jones on cheating on deadlines to sneak warmist material into the IPCC:
“Ammann/Wahl – try and change the Received date! Don’t give those sceptic something to amuse themselves with.”
Tom Wigley on ousting the editor of Geophysical Research Letters (achieved):
“If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse sceptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.”
Phil Jones to Mike Mann on keeping two sceptics’ papers from the IPCC:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Mike Mann on removing the editor of Climate Science (achieved):
“How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that anti-greenhouse science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on).”
Mike Mann to the CRU’s Tim Osborn and Keith Briffa, on blocking sceptics’ comments on his Real Climate website:
“We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not …”

OUR THEORY ISN’T WORKING! “Where the heck is global warming?”
IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth privately tells Mann, Santer, Wigley, Jones and leading alarmists such as Stephen H. Schneider and James Hansen that the data doesn’t show what their climate models predicted:
“… where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. … The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

And there are thousands of these emails! Several good books – and movies – could be churned out over this incredible story. The truth is, the alarmists have been caught with their pants down. Science is not the sacred cow it pretends to be. It is made up of fallible, tempt-able, and corruptible people, just like every other profession.

Indeed, many have written about this over the years. We should have listened to them more closely. For example, back in 2001 Daniel Greenberg wrote an important volume entitled, Science, Money, and Politics. In it he documented how science is often far from the pristine, neutral and objective enterprise we tend to think it is.

I wrote a review of this book which can be found here: www.billmuehlenberg.com/2004/08/22/a-review-of-science-money-and-politics-political-triumph-and-ethical-erosion-by-daniel-greenberg/

Let me feature just one paragraph from that review: “Science in many ways has now replaced religion and philosophy as the most respected source of knowledge and wisdom. Today when a scientist speaks, people listen. This is all part of the tendency to see science as saviour, and to regard scientists as saints. Put on a white lab coat, and people assume you speak the truth. After all, science is about facts and objectivity. Right? Not necessarily. The truth is, scientists are people just like us, and as such are just as capable of shortcomings, bias, and pushing agendas. Scientists, in a word, can be bought just like anyone else. And if this new book is anything to go by, there is a lot of buying going on.”

Climategate is just another example of all this. It tells us a lot about advocacy research, politicised science, and researchers selling themselves to the highest bidder. And it tells us a lot about the science of manmade climate change. As one clever letter writer to the Australian expressed it, “The release of hacked emails between climate scientists shows that the evidence for man-made global warming could possibly be . . . er . . . man-made.”

www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/rorting-data-is-hell-nino/story-e6frfhqf-1225803452749

[1587 words]

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Published:
25.11.09 / 10am
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